Deep Down
by treacle-antlers
Summary: A single scene between Buffy, Spike rejection and acceptance written post 'Empty Places'


**Deep Down  
**(WARNING! Based on spoilers for 7/19)  


  
Despite the warm spring night outside, it's cold inside his crypt. But then that suits her just fine.   
  
Everything about her is cold tonight. Her heart, her eyes, her face - the features drawn so tightly together, so carefully composed that she feels as if her skin has been stretched paper-tight, drum-skin thin over the bones. She feels hard and hollow inside, a painful stone-sharp weight in her chest like the dark pit from an avocado and tears seem too far away to even consider. Far too frivolous.  
  
They told her to leave.  
  
Her own sister. Her best friends.  
  
They told her to leave, and she left them. And she doesn't know how to feel about that. Hard to feel guilt, hard to feel the fear she knows she should feel - responsible for all their lives as she is. For Dawn's life. Because they relieved her of the responsibility. They absolved her of it. Because she is, after all, not the _only_ Slayer in this world. There is more than one Chosen One.  
  
And now her own feet, also treacherous, have carried her here despite her wishes. After standing in the rectangle of light in front of her own front door - her home - for a minute longer, she had started to move away before realising that she had nowhere left to go. Everyone she knew or cared about was contained within the walls of that house, and their rejection was every bit as powerful as any barrier spell could ever be.  
  
She stares down at her shoes and sees that they are ruined. Small, impractically-heeled suede now unrecognisable under a thick sludge of cemetery dirt, and somewhere inside her a voice asks her why she cares. Although she knows why. Because the details are what you notice when the pain is just too damn big. When it's swallowing you whole - like the whale in 'Pinocchio' - it's mouth so wide you never even feel the sides.  
  
Pressing her palms to the surface of the sarcophagus, she lifts her body and seats herself. Brushes the dust from her hands, and then places them in her lap. They fold together, one protecting the other, and she examines the thin knuckles beneath the skin with a distant curiosity.   
  
Her hands are pale. The nails smooth and neat like pebbles. She always tries to keep them clean. Turning the left one over, she traces her palm with the thumb of her right. The lifeline is short and there are no baby lines where she knows there should be. Where Dawn has two; ' for a boy and a girl'.   
  
A cruel, deep slash from side to side - her heart line is like a knife-scar.  
  
She presses her hands down, against her thighs and tries to make it hurt. Presses the tips of her fingers in the muscle, hard. Harder. And thinks; _how hard until she draws blood? _How hard did _he_ have to press? How hard before it hurts like Xander hurts.  
  
She hears him come in, but she's long past caring now anyway. It isn't about him after all, and despite where she is she tells herself that she didn't expect him to find her here. For him to know this was the one other place she might run to. Not until his fingers fold iron-tight around her wrists, trapping them together, and then she knows she has to see him, to acknowledge his presence.  
  
"Leave me alone Spike."  
  
He frees her hands with a gentleness she's still unused to and his face tilts down and under her own, a fingertip to her cheek.  
  
"You're bleeding."  
  
She flinches away from him and sees him react to that, minutely, an echo of her pain. His nearness is making the hollowness inside her resound like a bell and she feels sick from it. That he can be right here and yet she could still feel so completely alone.  
  
"It's nothing. I cut myself when I was...on a branch."  
  
He doesn't move but she feels his eyes on her, blue reaching into her.  
  
"They're just afraid, pet." he says.  
  
And then the tears are fighting their way to the top and won't stop, like sea-water rising. Rising up inside the whale, filling it up, dragging everything with it, all the junk she has in there with her. All the stuff that she thought she'd made sure could never be disturbed, that's all there too, pulling up from it's moorings and swirling around her. She draws in a breath, ragged, forces out the words.  
  
"I don't...know...what to do."  
  
He's still standing there, still motionless, but she feels him now. And his emotion is almost as strong as her's; anger, fear, washing back at her.   
  
"Yes, you do_._"   
  
He moves in to press against her shoulder, and in front of her eyes, a hand moves to fit around her own.   
  
"You're Buffy remember? You _always _bloody know."  
  
She almost smiles, but somehow it's frozen there behind her lips. Her hand moves like a bird inside his.  
  
"What if I don't this time?"  
  
His chin is resting lightly on the crown of her head, and she can feel his lips moving against her hair as he replies.   
  
"You'll think of something, love. You always do."  
  
His other hand comes to rest between her shoulder blades for a second, before stroking down - a single smooth line to the base of her spine. She shivers and he moves in fractionally closer, as if he's forgotten that he doesn't have body heat he can transfer to her.  
  
"They trust _Faith_ more than they trust me."  
  
"They don't know who to trust."  
  
"They think she's a better leader."  
  
"They're just kids. What do they know about leadership?"  
  
A strand of hair drops forward over her face and he pushes it back, smooths it into place with a soft palm.  
  
"Faith's smart, she talks tough. And maybe she is."  
  
His hand comes to rest against her lower back again, before he moves to pull himself up onto the stone surface beside her. His head ducks down, finds her eyes again.  
  
"But she isn't you, Buffy."  
  
She looks away from him.   
  
"She's a Slayer."  
  
He nods, head still bowed.  
  
"Just like the one before her. And the one before that."  
  
His words are spoken gently.  
  
"They all died. They had to. But not you."  
  
Something in his tone makes her heart hurt and she turns to him again, sees his profile coloured by the blue-white of the moon filtering through old glass. The dark strike of his eyelashes against his cheek as he bows his head down to the hand he holds, presses his lips to it.   
  
"Not this time, love. I promise."  
  
He moves a finger to her cheek. Traces the curve from brow to lips, so slowly it feel like a painter's brushstroke, and her eyes close.   
  
_So very tired. _  
  
She folds her legs up against her, her head sliding down his chest to rest in his lap. His hand moving to smooth back her hair again, repeating the movement until her heartbeat settles. Breathing slows. Limbs loose their rigidity, muscles relax. She rolls her cheek, once, against his thigh.  
  
"I trust you," she says.


End file.
